Quotes from Matt Fitzgerald

Even most training errors, such as overtraining, originate in the fear of suffering.

In a race, the job of the muscles is to perform. The job of the mind is to cope.

The muscles can only perform to the degree that the mind is able to cope. Endurance sports are therefore a game of "mind over muscle.

You don't become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many day, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.

To become the best athlete you can be, you need to become really good at coping with the characteristic forms of discomfort and stress that the endurance sports experience dishes out, beginning with perceived effort and extending to the many challenges that are secondary to it, such as fear of failure.

My own term for a highly developed overall coping capacity in endurance sports is mental fitness.

The ultimate compliment for me in my peak training years was being passed on my easy runs by a runner who had a marathon time more than an hour slower than mine. I'd say to myself, "He's wearing himself out today. I'm building myself up.

you don't want to change your training for the sake of shedding more fat without regard for how the changes will affect your performance. You should train for performance and trust that your body will move toward racing weight as your fitness moves toward peak level.

There is an emerging consensus among exercise scientists that runners and other endurance athletes invariably encounter a limit to how much suffering they are willing to tolerate before they encounter any hard physical limit (such as their true VO2max

The new Rob saw the restoration of his ability to run as a gift, a precious and fragile blessing that he wished to honor by racing not for respect or attention as before but for the inner journey, and by listening to his body and respecting rest, and also by investing himself in the trail running community.

The ultimate mark of skillful running is the ability to run with minimal mental effort.

It was a decision she would not regret, performing well enough right out of the gate that no further persuasion was required to convince Jamie to drop other sports and focus exclusively on running for the next three years.